Adolescents swing from euphoric self-confidence and a kind of narcissistic strength in which they feel invulnerable and even immor...tal, to despair, self-emptiness, self-deprecation. At the same time they seem to see an emerging self that is unique and wonderful, they suffer an intense envy which tears narcissism into shreds, and makes other people's qualities hit them like an attack of lasers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has b...een abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human c...ontact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but... a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it p...roduces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing "other," ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other--and then it becomes meaningless. This is why the clinical profile of narcissism is not of a state of activity, but of a state of being. There are erased the demarcations, limits, and forms of time as well as relationship. The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking for an expression or reflection of himself in Experience, he devalues each particular interaction or scene, because it is never enough to encompass who he is. The myth of Narcissus neatly captures this: one drowns in the self--it is an entropic state.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Today's journalism is obsessed with the kinds of things that tend to preoccupy thirteen-year-old boys: sports, sex, crime, and nar...cissism.... Moreover, if today's journalism has a driving principle, that principle centers on an obsession with hypocrisy. Journalism is about many things, but these days it is often about revealing that public figures are phonies. Covering Bill Clinton or Prince Charles, or Michael Jackson, reporters frame their stories by saying implicitly, "These people aren't what they say they are. Look, they lied to you." Although there is a cultural role for balloon deflators, journalism has brought this characteristic attitude of the early adolescent to the adult world and elevated it to the status of cultural religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and sel...f-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and w...hole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, a...nd must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, t...hey can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »